Whidbey

I've been playing with Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) over the past few days and it's just so great!  I've been using it on and off since last May and it's going to be a great release.  The addition of Edit-and-Continue for C# will really cement it as a world-class environment.  I worked for quite awhile in Java with no such feature in sight.  Back in my VB 5.0 days that was almost the top attraction (the RAD UI development versus Java was probably the top).  Coupling that with Generics (very excited about that), greatly improved iteration (which really opens up a whole new way of coding in some ways), and the Class Designer (UML is too heavy for most teams/projects anyway), not to mention a great start at refactoring (not quite up to par with IBM WebSphere Dev Studio for Java), it looks like a very worthy successor to VS 2003.  That last sentence was horrible in terms of structure and length, but I'm just really excited about it!  Oh yeah, and the membership and personalization features of ASP.NET will blow other offerings out of the water.  I worked with Struts when in the Java world.  It was such a great step up from Servlets and JSP-based development, but it was only a glimpse at what ASP.NET had to offer.  JavaServer Faces seemed like a good step up, but I haven't tried it yet.  Maybe it comes closer.  Still though, the underlying API's are only part of the solution.  The right IDE makes a world of difference.  I'm looking forward to Beta 2 (whenever that is), as apparently it will come with a Go Live license.  It would be great to be able to more with that.